Who is this “We” You Speak Of

One of the more irritating aspects of contemporary pop public discourse is the obsession with the first person plural as a propaganda and marketing tool that manipulates the reader into a bemused, concerned and totally false community: We can’t get enough of [X]….This is the [X] we all need…..

It’s a feature of parenting – well, mothering-related discourse as well. The online world of Hustling, Relatable Moms with Messy Lives in Full Makeup are all about assuming the “we.” We moms all feel this, struggle with this, and need this – the latter of which always involves giving more clicks and money to whatever Hustling Mom is selling today. The Hustling Mom creates a “we” around herself, and creates purported real-life dramas – relatable dramas – to keep the eyeballs sticky, the clicks coming, the community building, the “we” going.

Guess what? You probably don’t live on an island or mountaintop by yourself. You’re probably surrounded by human beings with relatable, messy lives. You want to be involved and find community?

Talk to those real people.

Anyway, that wasn’t supposed to be the main focus of this entry – so let’s get down to business. What I wanted to talk about was another manifestation of this community-assuming-narrative-building: a narrative built around an assumption of shared sensibilities and interests – that we all view this particular subject matter in a particular way. It’s a different way of editorializing the news.

Example from the Catholic world. This weekend, the following popped up on Twitter or Facebook for me:

“Catholics outside the West may well wonder why, of all the things happening in and around the Vatican on Friday, it was an LGBTQ meeting that dominated media attention.”

Catholicism in the 21st century is ever more a global faith, with more than two-thirds of its 1.3 billion members living outside the West. As a result, learning to appreciate how Catholics in other parts of the world react to things is essential to thinking intelligently about church affairs.

Friday brought a classic example, as Westerners may not quite appreciate the resentments different media coverage of the Church at times can generate.

For most of the Western press, the big Vatican story on Friday was a meeting between Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the pope’s top aide, and roughly 50 lawyers and activists representing the LGBTQ community who want the Vatican to condemn the criminalization of homosexuality in some parts of the world….

….What else was going on at the Vatican on Friday?

Well, to begin with, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published a major spread commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, that orgy of violence in 1994 that left an estimated 500,000 to one million people dead in just 100 days, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus. One estimate is that a stunning 70 percent of Rwanda’s Tutsi population was slaughtered in that period alone….

….Also on Friday, news emerged that opposition figures will join a retreat in the Vatican next week for the political leadership of South Sudan, raising hope that a concrete new peace agreement may result….

….Also on Friday, Catholic leaders in Italy heard from Cardinal Joseph Coutts of Karachi, Pakistan, who’s in Italy for a series of events in Venice, Florence and Milan sponsored by Aid to the Church in Need, a papal foundation supporting persecuted Christians around the world.

Allen concludes:

If you’re a Catholic in Africa today, home to by far the world’s most rapidly growing Catholic population, or Asia, you might well wonder why the LGBTQ meeting Friday drew such a strikingly greater share of attention than the Rwandan anniversary, the Vatican’s efforts to broker peace in South Sudan and religious freedom in Pakistan.

To tell the truth, you probably wouldn’t wonder at all – you’d simply conclude that Westerners are more interested in their own issues than what matters to the rest of the world. Understanding that instinct, and how it can breed suspicions and resentments, increasingly will be part of the price of admission to life in a global Church.

As I finished reading this, it was Tonto’s old question that popped into my head once again: Who is this “we” you speak of , kemosabe?

I’m not sure what Allen is trying to do here by framing the story in this way – he is deeply committed to telling stories of the global persecution of Christians and perhaps he simply found this to be a good hook to get more attention – thereby, fulfilling his own prophecy.

But the bigger question, it seems to me, is the assumption in the piece and headline – whether it’s contrived for editorial purposes or not – that we in the West are, indeed, more interested in LGBTQ issues than that of persecution and this is a situation that just sort of…exists. It’s floating out there. It just…happens…and “we” just…feel these things and happen to have this …interest.

Well, no. What “issues” grab “our” attention at any given moment is due to a number of factors, many of them unquantifiable, but to be sure there’s very little randomness about any of it. If LGBTQ issues grab a lot of airtime and attention from media…that’s because they’re choosing to focus on it.

In short, it might not just be Christians in Africa who are wondering about the “strikingly greater share of attention” for those issues that just sort of seems to …exist…for, apparently, no discernible reason.

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2 Responses

I’m kind of confused, because I don’t see “we” in your excerpts from Allen’s article (though I do see it in your discussion). Do you mean the “you,” the hypothetical African whom Allen is apostrophizing? Or “Westerners”?

I’m familiar with the politically manipulative “we,” as in “we [meaning you] must learn to make sacrifices so that we [meaning I] may at last enjoy the blessings of a just society,” etc. It recurs in that tetralogion so dreaded by children and spouses: “We need to talk.”

More of an extension/expansion of the sensibility: “What I wanted to talk about was another manifestation of this community-assuming-narrative-building: a narrative built around an assumption of shared sensibilities and interests – that we all view this particular subject matter in a particular way.”

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Badlands, South Dakota August 2019

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A short story about mothers, daughters, and why we believe what we say we believe…or not.